Another Tharanga knocks on the door

The way SSC left-hander Tharanga Paranavitana's career is shaping up it won't be long before Sri Lanka will have two Tharangas opening the batting for them in Test cricket.

Already Upul Tharanga, another left-hander has established himself as a Test and one-day opener in the side and Paranavithana could follow him in the very near future. With Marvan Atapattu concentrating more on the one-day game because of a back injury and Sanath Jayasuriya not in the best of form in the longer game, the time could be ripe for Paranavitana to move into the opener's slot especially for the Tests against Bangladesh when they tour Sri Lanka in July.

Anura Tennekoon, former Sri Lanka captain, is of the opinion that Paranavitana has the ingredients imbedded in him to make it to the Test team. "He is a good opening bat with the ability to know where his off stump is. That is most important for a batsman," said Tennekoon. "This boy has the patience to play long innings and is an ideal long game player. But he needs to improve his footwork especially against spin."

It was Tennekoon who spotted Paranavitana when he was out on one of his coaching assignments in Kegalle as secretary of the Sri Lanka Cricket Foundation in the late nineties. "I picked him and gave him special training under the SLCF scholarship scheme. He had natural talent and it was a matter of giving him the opportunity to develop his batting," said Tennekoon, one of the finest batting technicians produced by the country.

Till that break Paranavitana has been making a lot of noise as a schoolboy scoring 1,000 runs a season on three consecutive occasions from 1999-2001 for St. Mary's MV, Kegalle. The final season he hit six hundreds including a double century. Paranavitana, 24, further showed his prowess with the bat when he joined Saracens SC while still at school and smashed a triple century against Peterson SC in a Segment 'B' match in 2001-02. His talents were too vast to ignore and SSC, the glamour cricket club of Sri Lanka soon signed him on.

Paranavitana broke into the ranks of the Sri Lanka 'A' side in 2004 when he toured India, but his best performance came in the under 23 Emerging trophy triangular contest against India and Pakistan where he emerged as 'Best Player of the Tournament' scoring fifties against both teams. He has begun the 2006-07 season on a high registering the highest score by compiling 174 against BRC at his home ground Maitland Place. "I rate this as the best of my five first-class hundreds because it was chanceless," said the 24-year-old bank assistant from Seylan Bank. "If I can make a couple of more hundreds like that I should be able to convince the selectors how good I am."